


Hidden Inside

by RunawayWind



Category: Naruto
Genre: F/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-10-02
Updated: 2018-10-02
Packaged: 2019-07-23 23:54:24
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 2
Words: 2,419
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/16169342
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/RunawayWind/pseuds/RunawayWind
Summary: The roots of Konoha's Will of Fire run deeper than anyone can imagine. Deep enough to bring together four people who had no one else. Deep enough to give them something to hope and fight for, even when there's nothing left.You see, the things we hide can destroy us or make us who we are.The difference is in who we would die for.The memorial in Konoha held the names of everyone who had died in battle, on missions or defending the village. Sakura's parent's names were on it, and maybe someday her name would be etched on it too. She used to be afraid of the thought, but now Sakura decided that it if it did come true, it will be because she died protecting everyone that she loved.





	1. Genin Exams

A blade is masked by a sheath,  
the stars are hidden at first dawn.  
A butterfly is born from a caterpillar,  
and fire will explode from a bomb.  
Sometimes…  
Something different is hidden inside.  
___  
Genin Exams  
___  
Uzumaki Naruto cackled wildly after successfully transforming into something that was definitely not Iruka-sensei. The rest of the class was either shouting at him, laughing, or still asleep.  
"Why, you," Iruka-sensei growled at the boy. He took a deep breath and squeezed his eyes shut, then opened them and glared at Naruto. "Maybe Sakura can show you how to do a proper transformation," he ground out through clenched teeth.  
After a nod from Iruka-sensei, a small girl with dirty pink hair pulled back into a low ponytail walked to the front. She transformed into the class's sensei without a word.  
"That is how you transform!" the teacher exclaimed in exasperation to Naruto. He wasn't listening, and Iruka-sensei hauled him back to his desk. The girl named Haruno Sakura shared a shy smile with Hyūga Hinata.  
\---  
A day later, Sakura walked into the Academy examination room.  
"You did well on the written part, Sakura. For the last part of your exam, I need you to make two clones." The chūnin who was sitting next to Iruka-sensei smiled at her. She stared at them, surprised. That was it?  
They didn't look like they were joking, so Sakura formed the seals for the clone jutsu. She steeled herself against the horrible drain of chakra and the rush of lightheadedness and nausea. Once that was over, two perfect clones stood next to her.  
"Good job, you've graduated." Iruka grinned at her.  
"Thank you, sensei," she replied quietly. She bowed to him and took the blue hitai-ate he handed to her, but she knew her test wasn't over yet.  
Sakura walked out of the classroom and crossed the academy grounds over to her uncle, who was waiting near the other parents. She stopped in front of him and bowed again.  
"Sakura," Uncle Shin said coldly. "It seems that idiot Iruka thinks you can act like a true shinobi instead of just a brat playing ninja. I will decide for myself."  
Sakura cleared her face of any emotion. Her uncle turned and strode back towards the Haruno training yard.  
When they reached their home, Uncle Shin's test was as brutal as Sakura had expected. Each time she blocked one of his hits two more were behind it, twice as fast and twice as unyielding. For hours, he tested her physical strength, jutsu, and reflexes.  
"Weak," he sneered at her collapsed form long after the moon had risen. "You aren't worthy of the title of shinobi, nor of that headband you earned." He turned his back on Sakura and walked towards the Haruno house. Sakura gritted her teeth.  
"Uncle, wait, I-"  
\---  
Shin turned back to stare at her small body trembling, trying to stand in a defensive position. He smirked and grabbed a handful of rocks from the potted plant on the deck of his house.  
He started tossing them at the pink-haired brat before him. She dodged the first few, and then Shin began to throw them with more force and accuracy. His aim wasn't perfect because of the spar earlier, but it was good enough for now.  
One small stone hit the brat's shoulder. She flinched with enough force to make her fall to her knees again. Shin used another to knock the new hitai-ate off her head with a crack. Perhaps that would make her understand.  
She fell backward and lay there, motionless. Shin sighed and walked toward her. "Sakura, can't you see it? All your enemy needs is a handful of rocks to defeat you." He shook his head. "You're pitiful. A failure doesn't deserve to wear the leaf of Konoha."  
Shin used his foot to grind her headband into the ground, then he laughed. "You're lucky. At least you'll know that you're weak and useless before you go get yourself killed on a mission you weren't ready for, like your parents. My brother," he spat. Shin turned his back on the trembling girl, heading inside to clean up before his next mission started.  
\---  
Sakura reached for the hitai-ate now half-buried in the yard, but it was still too far away.  
She closed her eyes. Tears ran down her cheeks, mixing with the dirt and blood and leaving behind trails of mud on her face.  
She should've expected this.


	2. Team Assignments

The next day Sakura woke up dirty, stiff, and sore in the Haruno training yard. She pushed herself up off the ground and blinked in the bright light.  
Suddenly she gasped, scrambling upright through the pain. Was she late to meet her team?  
Her sudden nervousness and excitement disappeared as she saw the hitai-ate, so new and shiny and perfect yesterday now half-buried in the dirt. Her throat closed, and it felt like she couldn't breathe.  
Uncle Shin was much, much, stronger than Iruka-sensei. He was right.  
Sakura picked up the headband and carried it inside. She washed her wounds mechanically, dressing the cuts and scrapes from the kunai, shuriken, and wire the same way she always had.  
Then she did something she had found in a medical book a few months ago on one of her many trips to the library. Sakura focused on the tiny bit of chakra in her body that she could feel. She slowly, painstakingly, turned it into base chakra and pushed it around her body. She didn't know if it healed her faster than she would've normally, but it did make it easier to move. It also told her exactly how much chakra she had for the day, too.  
After that, she got dressed in her usual brown tunic and packed a few weapons and basic supplies, then glanced at her hitai-ate. It was still dirty, bloody, and burnt from the fire ninjutsu Uncle Shin had used last night.  
Sakura washed the blue headband and tied it around her waist where she could hide it better. She didn't deserve to wear it.  
\---  
Sakura wasn't late for the team assignments, but she wasn't sure if that was a good thing or not.  
She sat in her usual seat in the back corner of the classroom and watched everyone else. Ino had thrown a fit over Naruto sitting next to Sasuke, which was funny because Naruto liked Ino and Sasuke didn't care either way. Those three were fun to watch because they took her mind off the pain and helped her forget about Uncle Shin. Naruto had even graduated, which surprised her.  
Sakura caught Hinata's eye and smiled.  
"Good luck on your team, Sakura," Hinata murmured.  
"You too, Hinata," Sakura grinned, then winced. Her voice sounded too loud to be proper to address the heiress, but Hinata smiled at her anyway. She let out a small breath she hadn't known she was holding.  
Sakura looked back to the Naruto in front, just in time to see him and Sasuke fall into the most awkward-looking kiss she'd ever seen. Her eyes widened and then she broke out into quiet, mad giggles as the rest of the class roared with laughter. Naruto and Sasuke argued fiercely, both grossed out and defensive. And then Naruto was soundly beaten by Ino. Again.  
She giggled again, wondering what those three would be like as a team.  
Then she panicked. When Uncle Shin disappeared this morning, did that mean...? No, he couldn't be a jōnin instructor, the village thought he was just a chūnin! He had forbidden her to let anyone know about his ANBU tattoo so the Hokage wouldn't give him a team… Would he?  
"Alright, genin, settle down." Iruka-sensei grinned at the group in front of them. "First off, congratulations on graduating from the academy!"  
There was a cheer from everyone in the class. Sakura tried to smile, but her headache was steadily getting worse as Iruka started listing off the genin teams.  
The pain and nausea from the seal Uncle Shin had put on her chakra was getting worse too. She never complained though. It meant her chakra was coming back after last night.  
"Team 7 will be Haruno Sakura, Uchiha Sasuke, and Uzumaki Naruto," Sakura heard Iruka-sensei say her name, bringing her back to the world around her. She looked at her two team-mates in shock.  
"Good luck," she heard Hinata murmur again.  
"Aww, come on, I have to be with him?! Wait, who's Sakura?!" Naruto twisted around to squint at the class behind him. Sakura wished she could disappear. Uncle would hate this, even if she did manage to stay a genin ninja and not have to go back to the Academy.  
"Idiot," Ino huffed and slammed Naruto's head into the desk. She turned to glare at Sakura in the back of the room. "Don't think you're better than me, pinky. Sasuke is mine," Ino hissed. Sakura nodded quickly. Ino was the daughter of the head of the intelligence division. She had to be strong, and there was no way Sakura would, or even could, challenge her.  
Sakura saw both Naruto and Sasuke looking at her at her along with the rest of the class. She stared down at her desk as her cheeks burned. She didn't know what they expected her to do and sighed in relief when Iruka-sensei cleared his throat.  
"Team 8 will be Hyūga Hinata, Aburame Shino, and Inuzuka Kiba..." Sakura managed a smile when Hinata sighed at Kiba's indignant shout.  
\---  
"Where is our jōnin?!" Naruto demanded of the classroom door for the seventeenth time in the past two hours. Sakura could practically hear Sasuke grinding his teeth together from all the way across the classroom.  
"I don't know, idiot."  
"Shut up asshole," Naruto grumbled. As Sakura watched him despite her nagging headache and nausea, she saw his fidgeting get worse.  
He began to jump around the classroom, hopping on desks and making paper shuriken from notepaper left behind and aiming for a bulls-eye on the chalkboard from various positions around the room. Sakura giggled quietly when he threw a shuriken from between his legs, backward, and it nearly flew into Sasuke's nose.  
Then Naruto stopped moving, and a mischievous grin crossed his face. He tore out of the room, leaving Sasuke and Sakura behind to wait in silence.   
Without the distraction of Naruto, Sakura started to worry again. Eventually, she got up and walked down to the front row and stood near one of the desks, trying to get up the nerve to talk to Sasuke. She'd never talked to him before. He was cute, and strong too. He was the strongest genin that had graduated that year.  
"Do you think he'll come back?" she asked, just loud enough for Sasuke to hear.  
"Probably," he snorted in disgust without looking at her. "Idiot's too excited about actually graduating."  
As if on cue, Naruto barreled back into the room. He cackled wildly as he went around the cupboards, spreading what Sakura suspected was super-glue all over the insides of drawers and cabinets, and even in the keyholes and on the feet of the teacher's chair.  
He also glued the light switch permanently on, the chalk on the chalkboard, and the erasers underneath the teacher's desk. Sakura decided it was a good idea to keep Naruto occupied at all times.  
Sasuke eyed the cupboards now glued shut. "He's going to know it was you."  
"Ha! You just wish you had the guts to come up with something this brilliant, asshole." Naruto finished holding the chalk up on the board to dry, stepped back to inspect his work, and nodded. Sakura stifled a laugh. The chalk had been arranged to outline a large pile of poop.  
Naruto had kept one eraser back, though. He smothered the bottom of that one in super-glue, pulled over a chair, clambered up to the door, and lodged the eraser carefully between the door and the threshold with the glue-side down.  
"Serves him right for being so late," Naruto said proudly.  
"He's a jōnin, he's not going to fall for something as stupid as that," Sasuke grumbled. Naruto ignored him, still grinning like a madman.  
Sakura sat down nearer to the front of the classroom. Most of her nausea had faded, though her entire body was still sore and aching.  
She had never talked much with either of her new teammates before and studied them now from behind a curtain of pink bangs. Sasuke kept to himself, only speaking when someone - usually Naruto or Kiba - goaded him into it. He was the last of his clan, killed in a terrible massacre by his older brother years ago. And he was smart, pushing himself to be the top of the class. He liked to show off, in his own less obnoxious way.  
Naruto, on the other hand, was the infamous prankster nobody liked (except Hinata, Sakura remembered with a grin), but he didn't seem bad. He didn't have any parents either.  
Team Orphan, Sakura thought without much humor. She still had her uncle though.  
Naruto looked at her, then Sasuke. "Figures," he huffed, crossing his arms. "I get stuck with the quiet people."  
"I talk," Sakura said softly.  
"Well, Sasuke argues I guess," Naruto added, rubbing the back of his head. The Uchiha glared at Naruto. "Eh, could be worse," the blond continued, ignoring him. "Coulda been Shino or Shikamaru."  
At that precise moment, all three of them heard the door to the room slide open. Naruto whipped around eagerly to watch his prank in action. The three genin watched as the eraser fell, and landed with a slight puff of chalk dust on a silver-haired masked man.  
And stuck.  
"Gotcha!" Naruto cackled. "Serves you right, we've been waiting forever!"  
Sakura just stared at the older man in the doorway. Though it was funny, even she knew to check for traps as obvious as that. Was he actually a jōnin? Uncle Shin would've had her do hours of training just for falling for that simple trap.  
"Well," the man said. "My first impression of you three is–" Sakura held her breath for a heartbeat.  
"That you are absolutely worthless." His lone eye crinkled upwards in what Sakura assumed was a sarcastic smile. "Meet me on the rooftop in five minutes."  
All she could do was think about those two words. They seemed to echo in her head.  
Absolutely worthless.  
Sakura knew it. There was no way she was going to be able to stay a genin.


End file.
